[Termious]

Techies don't like to think about it, but it's obvious. The only reason why Chrome has come to dominate the market is because Google leveraged their monopoly in search. And even beyond Google Search, if you used Google Mail or anything else by Google, they'd repeatedly put notifications telling you that Chrome is great and why don't you download it? Then there's using all those billions of dollars to pay everybody to help advertise Chrome by adding it to their installers as an opt-out. It's no wonder Chrome is everywhere, Google did their best to abuse their position to ensure that it was a foregone conclusion.

I wonder more about why people accept their anti-competitive behavior when Microsoft was shafted for doing pretty much the same thing.

[kelnos]

Yeah, that's almost certainly true. I hadn't considered the advertising angle, since I generally don't see ads. But most people do.

I guess what baffles me even more is the talk on HN whenever something bad about Chrome comes up; it seems like most of the people commenting in those threads... run Chrome. Why? I'm not saying Firefox is perfect, and there are certainly places where it's lacking when compared to Chrome, but you'd think that the HN crowd (which, I know, isn't a homogeneous bunch) would largely be Firefox users.

I see so much posted on HN about outrage over privacy issues (in general, not specific to Google/Chrome), and yet... seems like most of those people use Chrome? It's confusing, to say the least. Switching to Firefox isn't going to fix everyone's internet privacy issues, but I find it hard to take someone seriously when they simultaneously rage about online privacy and use Chrome.

> if you used Google Mail or anything else by Google, they'd repeatedly put notifications telling you that Chrome is great and why don't you download it?

Is this still true, though? I seem to remember seeing something like that 5+ years ago, but I use GMail and Docs all the time, and never see anything that tells me to install Chrome.

[YetAnotherNick]

Then IE should be number one browser on windows, right? I haven't seen any nagging for chrome in past few years but seen lot for IE. Have you seen the notifications now or just guessing that they would be sending notifications. Any screenshots would be helpful.

[ksk]

They also paid Dell to make it the default, but I suppose that's more ethical than tricking people to install it by bundling it with Adobe Flash or whatever other junk.

But to be super fair to Google, it certainly was an excellent browser initially, far far better than the competition - in terms of simplicity, performance, ease of use etc. Now its just a data collection/spying apparatus for Google, and I can't ethically use it anymore. I finally managed to convince our IT to switch everyone over to Firefox, and block Google's tracking completely. The later should probably be a best practice for IT anyway.

[freyr]

Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer with Windows and made it impossible for users to remove it. That's not at all "pretty much the same thing."

[Termious]

Okay, do you care to address the core point of my comment? These are two examples of anti-competitive behavior. The details might differ, but the core idea of what they did and how they did it is the same (abusing their dominant position to anti-competitively disadvantage competitors). Yet Google gets a pass because "capitalism".

[freyr]

I've used Google search daily for many, many years now without ever feeling the need to use Chrome. I use Safari on my laptop and mobile Safari on my phone. I can't recall the last time I saw anything pushing me towards Chrome.

I'll take your word for it that these happens or happened, but I just tried a search in Safari and saw no Chrome ads.

[reportgunner]

But Chrome is the new Internet Explorer.